Barnegat Bay's decline can offer lessons around the world

Father, daughter return to local waters

Oct. 10, 2012

Andy Cavaliere and his daughter Christina head out into the Barnegat Bay from their Barnegat home to check on the health of the eelgrass in the beds where he usually goes to harvest bay shrimp. / Peter Ackerman/Staff Photographer

Written by

Kirk Moore

@KirkMooreAPP

What a bed of healthy eelgrass looks like. / Handout video

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At a glance

Grass shrimp, which are only about an inch long, are found in submerged eelgrass beds and near marshes in the Barnegat Bay. To catch them, bayman Andy Cavaliere uses a traditional grass shrimp boat over the shallow eelgrass beds — a 22-foot garvey with an outboard engine.

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Another in an occasional series of stories about life on Barnegat Bay.

During her summer back home, Christina Cavaliere’s research project on New Jersey farmers and fishermen took her back to places that she remembers from her earliest adventures with her father, Andy.

“My first solid food was a Jersey clam. He shucked a clam and put it in my mouth,” Christina said on her family’s dockside porch, as her father grinned at the memory. “I grew up on Jersey seafood and Jersey produce from up around Cream Ridge. We were on the boat every summer for 17 years.”

Andy Cavaliere’s love of Barnegat Bay led the retired State Police lieutenant to a second career as a commercial bayman - and a witness to the bay’s accelerating decline in recent years.

“I only gave it up for a couple years when the kids were young,” he said. “Christina really got the love for the sea, the bay and seafood. … And she wound up going all over the world after college.”

To Christina, it’s a familiar story playing out around the world. The deteriorating ecology of Barnegat Bay, and New Jersey’s belated program for reversing the long decline, can offer lessons to other nations where natural resources are under assault from population pressure, she said.

From those weekends on the bay, Christina picked up an interest in the natural world and people’s place in it. From college studies on the environment and ecology, she went on to get her master’s degree with studies on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and a career in sustainable tourism. She is a Norway-based project manager for the United Nations Environmental Programme, and now is working on her doctoral dissertation for the University of Otago in New Zealand.

“I spent most of my adulthood living outside of the United States: Costa Rica, Australia, Thailand, New Zealand,” Christina, 35, said.

This summer, she interviewed farmers, shellfish growers, chefs and state Agriculture Secretary Doug Fisher for a study on the challenges of climate change and food production, and the potential for partnerships between the food and tourism industries.

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The summer was a homecoming of sorts for Andy, too. After a three-year battle with throat cancer, he was back on the bay hauling his nets to catch grass shrimp — tiny denizens of the bay’s imperiled eelgrass beds, much in demand as bait by weakfish anglers.

“I was on the bay for about 35 years starting in the 1970s,” Andy said. “I’d say the last decade, there’s been a lot more buildup of algae in the water.”

The underwater eelgrass meadows are very much shrunken from their historic extent, he said, and “there’s less shrimp and crabs.”

“If you talk to a real bayman, they will tell you the bay doesn’t have nearly the amount of life that it used to, and I have to believe that,” Andy said. “I’m 67 now. When I was in my late 30s, I used to come down and get clams, fish, and I’d bring it home. … You could go out and get clams, a bushel of crabs, all you would need for the weekend.”

“I think New Jersey can really serve as a model for the rest of the world, because in 2007 the world became urbanized — more populations live in urban environments than in rural,” Christina said. “And New Jersey is, as we know, one of the most urbanized states in one of the most developed countries in the world. When we think about food networks, population pressures, the joy people feel in connection to natural places, this is really an important message for the rest of the world.

“I grew up with really loving the bay. That love is what inspired me to take action. And that’s what we’ve been missing,” Christina said.

Growing up on the bay

“It was fantastic,” Christina Cavaliere said. “It was constant activity: fishing, swimming. I learned a lot about tools. It seemed like at times in the early years of my life, my father didn’t have any lower body. His head was always sticking out of a hatch and he was saying, ‘Hand me this tool, hand me that tool.’

“So I learned how much work boats are. Also, the passion of neighbors and friends who were on and around the bay, how much that seascape meant to them,” she said. “The food. We’re Italian-American, so we grew up with that, and eating the seven fishes at Christmas.”

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On the roomy boat, Christina lived with her sisters and mom, Roe, and learned to swim and fish off the marina docks — sometimes by accident.

“I was, what? Maybe 5 or 6. And I had my own fishing pole. That was the thing, I finally had my own fishing pole,” Christina said. “And I said, ‘Watch me cast!’ … and I cast that thing so hard, I didn’t know the weight of my own body. And I went into the water.”

Andy’s interest in the bay and its traditional livelihoods brought him into contact with the baymen — commercial fishermen who set their gear according to seasons, harvesting clams, crabs, flounder and grass shrimp.

The shrimp are one reason why scientists say eelgrass beds are the base of the bay’s food chain, offering food and shelter for all kinds of animals. When weakfish invade the bay, they go hunting for their favorite food, a fact that anglers — and baymen — picked up on generations ago.

After he got a small waterfront house in Barnegat, Andy restored a traditional Barnegat Bay garvey — the blunt-nosed clammer’s workboat, stable and able to float in just inches of water over the shallow eelgrass beds.

Using aluminum spars, Andy built a trawl rig the way old-time baymen would have done it in cedar: A center mast and a pair of trawl arms to lower the nets over either side of the boat. In front of each net hangs a metal grate of vertical bars. Drawn through the eelgrass, the bars stir the grass without tearing it up, and shrimp pop up from the fronds and into the net.

Algae blooms foul the eelgrass beds and help kill off the grass, and the problem has been getting worse, Andy said.

A recent study by Rutgers University scientists found the bay’s problem with nutrient pollution — storm water flows from the mainland and overfertilizes the bay — is getting worse in Andy’s central section of the bay, even with the stronger tidal flushing from Barnegat Inlet.

Still working the bay

Christina Cavaliere’s doctorate fieldwork introduced her to Barnegat Bay’s own farmers — shellfish growers who shifted into producing clams and oysters from seed as the bay’s wild stocks declined in the last 20 years. Grass shrimp is still feasible as seasonal work: In recent years, about 140 fishermen held shrimping permits, according to state Department of Environmental Protection records.

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The state is taking good actions, Christina said. “I think that really took the bull by the horns when they passed that fertilizer law. I think continuing these livelihoods on the bay has to be more of a focus for the state.”

Realizing the economic potential of restoring the bay — that improved water conditions can actually put money into the economy — is quickly becoming a central selling point among people who work with shellfish.

In a recent letter to Gov. Chris Christie, Rick Bushnell of the volunteer restoration group ReClam the Bay suggested new aquaculture zones in the bay could generate revenue for the state.

“Right now, everyone is looking at this (bay restoration) as a cost. We need a new paradigm,” Bushnell said.

Those food traditions of the bay are a way to reconnect people with their environment, Christina Cavaliere said.

“Food is the area that makes it tangible to people,” she said. “Present someone with a beautiful platter of oysters or clams, and taste what a good environment can provide.”

“ReClam the Bay is a great program,” she said. “There’s a potential for engaging the public, both young children, but also adults. You get out into that natural environment, and it’s what you bring back from that experience, even if it’s not spraying the heck out of your lawn with fertilizer.

“Something that small at an individual level can have an impact. So I think the state has the right idea in terms of educating people about what individuals can do.”